-- THE ARCHIVE --

SINGAPORE
Judicial CP - April 2007

The Straits Times, Singapore, 2 April 2007

Man gets jail, cane for harassing debtors

A MAN who helped his uncle in harassing debtors was sentenced
to 12 months' jail and ordered to be given 14 strokes of the
cane.

Mohamad Azni Mohamed Sani, 22, pleaded guilty to eight charges
of doing acts likely to cause annoyance to occupants of various
HDB flats between Dec 15 and Jan 6. Twenty other charges were
taken into consideration.

He harassed defaulters by mainly securing their flats with
bicycle locks, splashing paint on the walls and writing their
house numbers and O$P$ (owe money pay money) on the walls.

His uncle, Mohamed Jailani Ibrahim, 40, unemployed, paid him
$50 a day, and had admitted being a runner for an illegal
moneylending syndicate.

So the 42-year-old had his buttocks bronzed at a tanning salon
and the effect was so good that even Nanxing praised Rayson's
backside for looking 'solid'.

TEASED BADLY

Rayson, however, jokingly complained: 'He was looking me up
and down like a pervert, I felt so 'molested'!'

It also didn't help that while Rayson was having special
effects makeup applied on his backside, his three cheeky co-stars
insisted on watching and teasing him about it.

Rayson griped: 'The three of them were sitting there drinking
coffee and looking at my naked butt. How do you think I felt?'

And with boys being boys, the four actors pulled some pretty
off-colour pranks on one another off set, with the chief
prankster being Nanxing.

One prank occurred while filming the same scene which required
Rayson to bear his butt.

As it was set in a spa, the other three actors were dressed
only in shorts.

And just before the cameras rolled, Nanxing suddenly pulled
down Geping's shorts, to the latter's horror.

Geping recalled: 'Luckily, my back was facing the camera and
the female director.'

When asked about his mischief , Nanxing burst into laughter,
before defending himself: 'Well, Geping's shorts looked like they
were too loose and about to fall off, so I was doing him a favour
by pulling it.

'It's just that I pulled it down instead of up!'

And by his own admission, Nanxing has always been a naughty
boy from young - he is no stranger to the cane.

The third child of four children, Nanxing revealed that he was
frequently caned by his parents because he didn't like to bathe
or go to school.

The 43-year-old admitted: 'I always had guotiao (slang for
cane marks) on my legs because I was caned so often! I had faded
ones from previous canings and also fresh ones.'

They had waylaid, assaulted and robbed fitter Ramalingam
Mayavel, 30, in a tract of open land along Boon Lay Way last Aug
5.

They pleaded guilty yesterday to causing grievous hurt to the
Indian national and robbing him of his valuables worth about
$270.

Mr Ramalingam, who was kicked and punched on his head, died of
serious head injuries the same day.

Roslan, Elly and Gibot were each given 6½ years and 24
strokes, while Baragang was sentenced to 12 years and 24 strokes.

Baragang also admitted to another robbery with hurt committed
about a week earlier.

He, together with the trio and a fourth man who is at large,
punched Bangladeshi worker Lokman Khalilur in the face and
relieved him of cash and belongings totalling $774 at Aljunied
MRT station last July 28.

Deputy Public Prosecutor Eugene Lee said police tracked down
the four men on Sept 7 following investigations. Police had found
out that when the four met at Aljunied MRT station on Aug 4, Elly
suggested that they go to Boon Lay to commit 'pow' - a term used
by people from Sabah to mean 'beat up and steal'.

On arrival at Boon Lay MRT station, they walked to an open
field. Elly kicked the bicycle Mr Ramalingam was riding, causing
him to fall and hit his head against a tree.

In the other case, Mr Lokman, 39, was resting on a raised
platform at Aljunied MRT station when five men surrounded him at
about 3.30am.

The charge against Roslan, Elly and Gibot for their part in
this incident was taken into consideration during sentencing.

Baragang had four other charges considered, while Elly and
Gibot had another each.

Man jailed, caned for role in cellphone heist

A DELIVERY driver was sentenced to six years in jail and 12
strokes of the cane yesterday for his part in planning a robbery
that left one of his colleagues dead.

Ragu Ramajayam, a driver for freight-forwarding company
Sterling Agencies, fed information to a friend about a delivery
of cellphones being carried out by fellow driver Wan Cheon Kem on
May 30 last year.

Mr Wan was transporting 10 pallets of Sony Ericsson phones
worth US$823,500 (S$1.25 million) from the Changi Airfreight
Centre to Henderson Road that morning when he was waylaid by
three men, who staged a minor collision with his lorry along
Changi Coast Road. He was assaulted and the cargo was stolen.

Mr Wan, 46, died of head injuries six days later in Changi
General Hospital.

Yesterday Ragu, 37, admitted to an amended charge of abetting
Arsan Krishnasamy Govindarajoo in the robbery.

He had given Arsan the registration number of Mr Wan's lorry
and details of the cargo he would be carrying. They decided to
target Mr Wan's lorry because, unlike many other drivers, he
worked alone without a cargo hand.

Deputy Public Prosecutor Stanley Kok Pin Chin said Arsan told
Ragu he would recruit others to commit the crime and reward him
for the information.

On May 30, Ragu learnt that Mr Wan had been assigned to
transport 2,700 cellphones. Telephone records showed Ragu and
Arsan spoke 11 times between 5.31am and 7.25am.

Arsan, 39, together with his alleged accomplices - Nakamuthu
Balakrishnan, 48, Daniel Vijay Katherasan and Christopher Samson
Anpalagan, both 23 - waited for Mr Wan to emerge from the
airfreight centre that morning.

Arsan is then believed to have driven off in a different
direction to await Balakrishnan's call while the rest followed Mr
Wan in another lorry.

Along Changi Coast Road, the trio then faked a minor accident,
forcing Mr Wan to stop. When he got out of the vehicle, Mr Wan
was bashed with a baseball bat. The trio then carried him into
his lorry and drove both vehicles to a Pasir Ris Park carpark,
where they loaded the mobile phones onto Arsan's lorry.

So far, 2,158 phones have been recovered.

Ragu was arrested on June 1.

DPP Amarjit Singh urged District Judge See Kee Oon to impose a
sentence close to the maximum 10 years allowed.

Ragu, he said, had betrayed his company and colleague in
giving Arsan and his accomplices information they would have
otherwise found difficult to acquire.

'His conduct was motivated by greed and is utterly
reprehensible and deserving of strong condemnation,' he said.

'It is clear...the accused had played a vital role in the
ultimate orchestration and execution of the robbery plan,' said
DPP Singh.

'Indeed, he was the vital cog in the wheel and without him and
his information, the robbery would have been stymied at the
planning stage.'

In sentencing, District Judge See considered Ragu's position
of trust, the high value of the cargo and the fact that Mr Wan
died.

BRUTAL ASSAULTS: In between the rapes, Ser also molested a woman, 34, at a staircase landing. He was given a 28-year jail term and 24 strokes of the cane for his rape offences.

THEY were among the most brutal sexual assaults the country
has seen in many years, carried out in the most brazen manner
imaginable.

Serial rapist Ser Eng Siong simply knocked on his victims'
doors in broad daylight, gained entry into their homes using
simple deception, then brutally violated them over and over
again.

Yesterday, the 33-year-old deliveryman was sentenced to 28
years in jail and 24 strokes of the cane for his attacks on three
young women, all of them from China.

His first victim on Nov 3 was an 18-year-old girl, who had
arrived in Singapore for the first time less than 12 hours
earlier.

She had been taking a nap alone in her room when Ser woke her
up by knocking on her window.

Pretending to be a repairman, he convinced her to let him in.
After fiddling with the gas canister in the kitchen for a while,
he told her it needed to be replaced.

When she went back to her room, he rushed in, shut the door
and pushed her onto one of the beds, telling her he would
strangle her if she struggled.

He then raped and sodomised her multiple times and forced her
to perform oral sex on him. Afterwards, as he casually washed up,
the teenager put on her clothes and locked herself in the toilet.

Enraged, Ser forced her to open the door and repeated the
abuse all over again.

When he was finished, he wiped the surfaces he had touched
with tissue paper, saying he was destroying evidence. He then
told her he was a Malaysian and would be leaving Singapore
immediately.

Ser's second attack took place eight days later on the morning
of Nov 11 at a flat rented by two young women, aged 20 and 22,
also from China, and their two housemates.

When he knocked on the door, the 20-year-old was having
breakfast and the 22-year-old was still asleep.

When the younger woman answered the door, he told her he was
looking for 'Xiao Chen'. It was a name he had plucked out of thin
air, but by a fateful coincidence, someone by that name had been
a recent tenant.

Seizing on this piece of luck, Ser said he wanted to return a
camera and leave a note for her. After getting inside, he dragged
the victim into the toilet, strangled her till she passed out and
raped her.

He then went into her housemate's bedroom, woke her, tied her
up and returned to the toilet.

The 20-year-old had just regained consciousness and began
screaming, so he throttled her again until she passed out, then
violated her with a toothbrush.

He then went back to the bedroom and forced the older woman to
perform oral sex on him, then raped and sodomised her.

When the ordeal was over, he took a laptop, the two victims'
mobile phones and a small amount of cash.

In between these two rapes, Ser had molested a 34-year-old
woman at a staircase landing on Nov 8.

All the assaults took place in the Balestier area.

Despite attempts at covering his tracks, police were able to
lift fingerprints from the scene of the first attack, which they
eventually traced to Ser, who has a previous conviction for
theft.

He was arrested in Geylang on Nov 12.

In the High Court, Ser pleaded guilty to a total of 13 charges
for aggravated rape, unnatural sex, aggravated outrage of modesty
and theft.

In urging the court to hand out a stiff punishment, Deputy
Public Prosecutor Francis Ng said: 'The very places where the
victims ought to have felt the most safe and secure instead
became the setting for the accused to act out his sickening and
depraved sexual fantasies.'

Reading out reports of psychiatrists who had assessed the
women, he said the brutal assaults had left them with indelible
mental scars.

DPP Ng said: 'In a short space of time, the accused has
irrevocably altered the lives of three young women, whose undoing
was their misplaced trust in human nature.'

A psychiatric report on Ser, meanwhile, stated that although
he might have had a depressive episode at the time, he was not of
unsound mind.

Pleading for leniency, Ser could only tell the court: 'I'm at
a loss for words.'